CableLabs® Certifies 8 More DOCSIS™ 1.1 Modems, Qualifies 9 More 1.1 Headends

The cable industry’s highly successful cable modem initiative has certified six new DOCSIS™ 1.1 high-speed cable modems and re-certified two more during the recently concluded certification wave for DOCSIS testing. There are now 32 CableLabs® Certified™ DOCSIS 1.1 modems. These products expand the supply of second-generation interoperable high-speed devices available to the cable industry.

Those companies receiving DOCSIS 1.1 certification status in the latest wave of testing (Certification Wave #22) are 3Com, Correlant, Joohong, and Motorola. Texas Instruments and Toshiba achieved re-certification for their DOCSIS 1.1 modems. In addition, CableLabs qualified and/or re-qualified nine DOCSIS 1.1 Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTSs) from ADC, Arris, Cisco, Juniper, Motorola, and Scientific Atlanta. In some cases, companies had more than one product qualified.

DOCSIS stands for Data over Cable Service Interface Specification. CableLabs is now entering its fourth year of conducting DOCSIS certification testing for high-speed cable modems on behalf of its cable system operator members. In that time, more than 10 million DOCSIS cable modems have been deployed in North America and millions more deployed around the world.

The 1.1 modems are compatible with existing DOCSIS 1.0 equipment and will work on cable systems along side modems that will be certified under future versions of DOCSIS. There are now a total of 32 DOCSIS 1.1 modems that are certified, and 16 CMTSs that are qualified.

“Our fourth year promises to be the most productive for DOCSIS,” said Rouzbeh Yassini, founder and CEO of YAS Broadband Ventures, LLC and senior executive consultant to CableLabs. “We have helped to meet a strong demand for broadband services and the cable industry is well positioned to continue its innovation and customer offerings by way of DOCSIS,” added Yassini, who heads the CableLabs Broadband Access unit.

Strategically, DOCSIS 1.1 opens a technological doorway to augmented revenue streams for cable providers. It does so by enabling the existence of high-speed Internet service tiers, via techniques known as data fragmentation and quality-of-service (QoS). Those two techniques allow cable providers to deliver high-speed Internet services simultaneously over the same plant—and in a path parallel to—core video services.

And, perhaps most importantly, equipment built to comply with the DOCSIS 1.1 specification becomes the foundation for expanding the list of advanced cable services offered by cable providers, including home networking through the CableLabs CableHome™ project, and packet telephony and multimedia services through the CableLabs PacketCable™ project.

To date, 214 DOCSIS 1.0 modems have been awarded certification and 28 CMTSs have been qualified by CableLabs. In this wave, 14 cable modems from the following companies acquired 1.0 certification or re-certification, in some cases for new products: AsusTek, Broadxent, Com21, LinkSys, Motorola, Pioneer, Scientific Atlanta, Thomson, and Toshiba.

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